“The Living Shadow” (part nine)

Time for more Shadow! Hopefully we'll have cleared this last slump and will start to get engaging again once Harry Vincent is sent on his third mission. Or it could turn out that the few chapters of quality during his Holmwood Arms stay were a total fluke and the entire rest of the book is going to be boring and miserable. We'll see!

The last chapter was called "Fellows Assembles Facts." This next one is called "Woven Facts." I guess Fellows has been busy over the chapter break!

19. Woven Facts​

The text describes the light of a spotlamp falling on an office table in a dark, classic noir flavored room. A pair of strong, pale-skinned hands reach out of the darkness into the lamplight and opening an envelope. The Shadow's true identity has been revealed as Bongo Bongo, it all fits now, got it. Also of note is that the Shadow has a ring with a fire opal set in it on his left hand. Diamonds weren't yet traditional for wedding rings when this was written, but wearing wedding rings on one's left hand was, so this implies that the Shadow is married. Or engaged. Or widowed. Or had his fiance die before the wedding could actually be performed. Probably the last one, it's the edgiest.

Anyway, the envelope contains the latest updates from Fellows, and the Shadow is reading up on the case. After reading the list of facts and details that Fellows "impressively" assembled last time, the Shadow cuts the paper into little bits with a pair of scissors and starts mixing and matching the sentences, arranging them in different ways trying to uncover a pattern that Fellows didn't see. The prose tells us that we should be amazed at the Shadow's intellect and inductive reasoning here, but doesn't tell us what he's doing or why, so I'm a bit reluctant to comply. Then he does the classic (or maybe not yet a classic? Is this scene perhaps the codifier of this entire visual convention?) routine of drawing a bunch of lines and arrows connecting everything. The end result is as follows:

““Geoffrey Laidlow... millionaire... no enemies... house at Holmwood... Laidlow returned home... accompanied by his secretary... went into the library... closed the door... heard a sound in the house... went to the study... discovered a man at the open safe... Howard Burgess... Laidlow’s secretary... knew the combination?... wearing coat and gloves... was shot and killed... ran to the front window... shot in the arm... dropped the revolver on the lawn... opened the safe... jewels were there... removed papers... scattered them on the floor... Ezekiel Bingham... criminal lawyer... lived near Laidlow... passing the house... stopped his car... heard shots fired... entered the Laidlow home... found Burgess... called the police... saw a man cross the lawn... met a man named Joyce... in his automobile at night... gave Joyce a copy of the code... demanded quick translation... ordered silence... purpose of the code... unknown... collection of gems.””

Is the Shadow mystically inferring that Burgess shot himself in the arm before tossing the gun out onto the lawn and then went back into the office to turn the loot over to Bingham and wait for the police to arrive?

That would be hilarious, just because of how over-the-top and unnecessary the shooting himself in the arm part is. What, did he think the police would suspect him unless he sustained anything short of a gunshot wound? And...what would he be getting out of this that was worth the cost of possibly crippling himself for life?

Maybe Bingham blackmailed him with something worse than the potential loss of an arm. I guess that could work. But regardless, the Shadow getting all this from just the available evidence is about as bullshit as him disguising himself as a person much smaller than he is. IS he actually supposed to use magic? The story doesn't feel like one that's meant to have magic in it, but I'm at a loss for other explanations, and the Shadow's whole vampire aesthetic at least does lend itself to that reading.

Anyway. The Shadow goes through a few more rounds of wild inference, plus adding a few details that I don't think the reader was made privy to until now (for instance, that Burgess was wearing gloves when the police arrived. I'm PRETTY SURE we weren't told that until now. Although...come to think of it, it's kinda stupid that Burgess and Bingham wouldn't have removed them before the cops showed up...). In the end, he concludes that the jewels were not actually in the safe, but rather the safe contained some papers with coded instructions of where to find the jewels. The cops were told that the thief already had the jewels to throw both them and the Laidlow family off and make them not think to relocate the rest (...assuming that said family didn't know where the late Mr. Laidlow actually kept his gem collection themselves. Which...yeah, that seems sort of unlikely itself tbh, that he'd have never told his wife).

And I guess the jewels that the Chinese gangsters were smuggling out of the city were um...just part of Laidlow's collection? Bingham and Burgess ransacked the house for obvious treasure whose loss they could blame on the thief, but are still looking for the rest of it? If not, then I'm not sure what the whole thing with the Chinese gangsters and their jewel box has to do with any of this, because Bingham couldn't have sold it to them if he hadn't yet found them himself.

...unless Burgess found a way to fuck over Bingham, and actually cracked the code and sold the jewels to the triad on his own before Bingham could. While in the hospital with a bullet wound in his arm. Lol.

He puts the narrative he constructed in a new envelope to be sent as an anonymous tip to the police. And then does his creepy laugh to himself, because that was funny I guess. End chapter.


I think you know everything I'd have to say about this one already, so let's just move on.

20. A Letter for Harry​

Unusually, this one opens with dialogue. Harry is called by the hotel desk, saying there's a letter for him and asking if he wants it brought straight to his room as he instructed previously. Nice retrospective storytelling, I guess. Definitely more space-efficient than this story normally is. Anyway, it's only been a couple hours since Harry's last visit to Fellows' office, so this is much sooner than he expected to get new instructions.

The letter is numbered "one," and written in a simple cipher that Harry's been taught how to easily decode. Short message, just telling him to go to a certain location ASAP, where he'll find a cab waiting for him. Get in, put on the uniform he finds folded up in the back seat, and look for more instructions in one of the pockets.

Well, I guess not every new mission can be a relaxed, pre-planned affair!

The ink vanishes after a minute, as per usual for the Shadow's messages. Harry hasn't seen this happen before, but he does remember how the letter Fellows read in his first visit to his office appeared to have been blank after the fact, so he puts together the ink-that-disappears-when-exposed-to-light thing and rolls with it.

Harry does as instructed, grudgingly skipping dinner and hoping he'll be able to make up for it before too long. He takes a cab to the location given, and then looks for the other cab that's waiting for him. Turns out that this one is empty, and supposedly belongs to him; a watchman hands him the key, and he finds a cabbie uniform in the back seat. Looks like he's being a cab driver tonight!

In the uniform's pocket, he indeed finds his next instruction. It's a much longer letter, and this time the task is a bit of a doozy:

““Come to Wang Foo’s before ten o’clock. Drive past. Circle the block and drive by a second time. Then park around the corner at the end of the street. Keep the cab out of sight, but loaf near the corner and watch down the block.

”When you see a Chinaman come from the tea shop, hurry back to the cab and be ready to pick up a man who will he coming from Wang Foo’s. If he does not arrive within one minute, drive down the street and watch for a passenger at the other end. The man may go the opposite way. Take him where he desires and remember his destination. Watch the meter. Collect.””

Also included is the tea shop's street address, since Harry never had to find it himself before. The note, once again, fades into a blank paper a minute after he opens the envelope.

A little risky, considering that Harry's face is known to Wang Fu and some of his henchmen. Actually, quite a bit more than "a little" risky. Given how his last visit to that place went, Harry might actually be reluctant to follow this order.

Also, I love the specificity of telling Harry to follow "a Chinaman" coming from the tea shop. If one of Wang's employees happens to make an unplanned ice cream run, the Shadow's whole plan is ruined.

The cab has a driver's card, with a photo of a man who looks enough like himself for him to pass as assuming grainy monochrome 1930's photography. The name on the card reads "Harry Patman." A pseudonym with Harry's real first name, presumably to help him respond to it more naturally. Harry is glad that he'll have a couple hours before needing to drive over there, so he can at least get dinner first. However, his reaction to having to go back to the place where he almost got Discount Fu Manchu'd to death is disappointingly understated. Just some quickly described "reluctance." It actually spends more words describing how annoying and nerve wracking it is for him to drive around in an empty cab and ignore people trying to hail him than it does his fear of returning to the triad lair. Also, the text makes a point of saying that the evening passerby in New York City's Chinatown neighborhood "included some Chinese." Thank you, story, I couldn't have imagined.

Anyway, he waits in the cab for over an hour, but the person doesn't arrive. He sits in the driver's seat until it's nearly midnight, getting increasingly anxious. End chapter.


Eh. Nothing egregiously dumb or time-wastey in this chapter. In some ways, it's a major step forward in efficient prose-writing over some similar previous chapters. But there's also a lot of missed characterization opportunities, which makes it still a step down from the heights of the Holmwood Arms episode.

Those two chapters were both very short ones, so let's do one more!

21. Wang Foo Receives a Visitor
​

We're back to Lu Choi with this one. He's still been sharing his overly long shifts doing the tea shop's small amount of legitimate tea-selling with the man impersonating his cousin. So either the fake cousin isn't the Shadow himself but just another agent of his, or the Shadow can be in multiple places at once. Again, I'm not entirely sure that he isn't supernatural; I know later versions of him weren't, but he could have started out in a slightly different genre for all I know. Anyway, Lu Choi's cousin, Ling Chow, lets the former convince him to take an extra evening shift of his. He also gets Lu to tell him about the mysterious, hulking white man who's been coming to have secretive meetings with the boss every few days recently. Ling negotiates with Lu to switch places with him at a specific time, and walk out of the tea shop when he does. That's going to be Harry's signal, I guess.

I still can't get over the stupidity of the Shadow or one of his agents impersonating Ling Chow well enough to fool his own family. Would it have really been that hard to just say that the Shadow actually turned the real Ling Chow?

Anyway, they switch, the big white guy comes in. Lots and lots of pages are wasted on describing everything in orientalist purple prose. The fake Ling Chow waits downstairs for Wang Fu to ring the servant bell, calling him up to the office. Apparently, Wang Fu trusts his employees' lack of English fluency to prevent them from understanding anything he talks about with his criminal guests. I guess that's reasonable enough. However, that doesn't explain why he rings the bell to call Ling or Lu upstairs and then just has him stand there doing nothing while he talks to the white guy for another five minutes.

Like, he calls an employee to the office. Then just keeps talking to the guy while said employee is standing behind him doing nothing for multiple minutes. Just so that the fake Ling Chow who secretly does know English can overhear it, I guess because Wang Fu is feeling magnanimous and wants to give his enemies a freebie.

-_-

Anyway, he overhears Wang Fu talking at length to the hulking white guy who goes by "Johnny." Johnny runs a food truck business that he uses as a front for his gig as go-between for criminal organizations. He's been in touch with "the old boy" on Long Island, and is trying to get him to hurry up and get the rest of those jewels already, but it's taking longer than expected. They briefly suspect that Bingham might be planning to fence those gems to someone else instead, but Wang Fu is willing to be patient for now. Also, Wang randomly tells Johnny about an incident a couple weeks ago when some other Chinese gangsters and a white accomplice tried to rip them off, costing him two henchmen when the scam turned into a battle. Right, the Shadow disguised himself as another Chinese guy when he rescued Harry, so Wang would naturally assume it was a rival Chinese gang behind the attempted trickery.

...well, that's one reason. He also notes that no non-Chinese person could have ever possibly found out about their secret protocols with the disc and everything. Which...well, that's in-character chauvinism and stupidity on Wang's part, considering just how damned many white guys were falling over each other to use that scam on him. but I'm not sure if it's *convincing* in-character chauvinism and stupidity.

Anyway, as Wang finally has the fake Ling Chow escort Johnny back to the door, the following passage appears:

“The man called Johnny looked at Ling Chow, and then at the silent Chinaman’s shadow. Funny things, shadows. A little man with a big shadow!”

So yeah, he's literally the Shadow again. "Can be in multiple places at once" is becoming a hard conclusion to avoid.

Johnny leaves the store, and hails the first cab he sees, which is of course Harry's. End chapter.


Sighhhhhhhh.